Trajectories of Memory

Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts

Edited by

Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, Edited by Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2008 by Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-646-7, ISBN (13): 9781847186461

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments....................................................................................... vii Introduction Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle ..........................................ix Part I: Acknowledging Personal Presence in the Embodied Nature of Scholarship .....................................................................................................1 A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer Julia Baker .................................................................................................3 Part II: Representations of the Holocaust in History...........................................13 Between the Known and the Could be Known: The Case of the Escape from Auschwitz Ruth Linn..................................................................................................15 Child Holocaust Survivors at Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmekThe Recorded Tale Unremembered Micha Balf................................................................................................41 The Impact of Jewish Soap and Lampshades on Holocaust Remembrance Joachim Neander......................................................................................51 The Use of Nazi Symbols in Israel: The Politics of Holocaust Discourse and Memory Dirk Michel ..............................................................................................79 Holocaust Survivors Attitudes toward Jewish Suicide: A Preliminary Examination Mark Mengerink ....................................................................................103 Place and Memory in Holocaust Survivor Oral Histories Jamie Wraight ........................................................................................127 Voices, Visions, and Silence: Reflections on Listening to Holocaust Survivors Sidney Bolkosky ....................................................................................145

vi

Table of Contents

Part III: Representations of the Holocaust in the Arts........................................157 The Golem Redux: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish American Literature Elisabeth Baer ........................................................................................159 Emigrant Narratives and their Devices in Spiegelman, Foer, and Sebald Hans Kellner ..........................................................................................175 Towards an Extension of Memory: W. G. Sebald Reads Jean Amry Markus Zisselsberger.............................................................................191 Spectral Topographies: Locating Auschwitz in W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz and Stephan Wackwitzs An Invisible Country Silke Horstkotte .....................................................................................225 Images and Imagination: Monika Marons Pavels Letters Caroline Schaumann..............................................................................249 Fragments and Beyond: Childhood Trauma in Binjamin Wilkomirskis and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidts Holocaust Testimonies and LifeWriting Julia Baker..............................................................................................279 Postmemory in Austrian Post-Holocaust Literature: Thomas Bernhards Heldenplatz and Elfriede Jelineks Totenauberg Christine Kiebuzinska ...........................................................................313 The Creation and Representation of Postmodern Geschichtsraum in Die Kinder der Toten Maria-Regina Kecht ..............................................................................333 Performance of Memory: Diane Samuels Kindertransport, Tim Blake Nelsons The Grey Zone, and Holocaust Representation Charlene Gould and Jeffrey Myers.......................................................353 List of Contributors...................................................................................375 Index ............................................................................................................381

Acknowledgments
We are indebted to the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and its director, Dr. Vivian Patraka, at Bowling Green State University, for support of this project through various stages. The book grew out of a conference of the same title that took place on the Bowling Green State University campus in March 2006 and included featured speakers Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Atina Grossmann, Henry Hank Greenspan, and Ernest Michel, of the UJA (United Jewish Appeal) Federation of New York. We would like to acknowledge the collegial efforts of Bowling Green State Universitys Colleges of Arts and Sciences and of Musical Arts, the Graduate College and the School of Art, the Fine Arts Galleries Center, the Ethnic Cultural Arts Program, the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages, the Graduate Policy History Program in the Department of History, and the Department of Theatre and Film, as well as the Robert H. Jackson Center of New York, for collaborating to bring together so many engaged speakers to our campus for the conference. We also thank all the contributors to this volume. Many thanks to the interdisciplinary research group or Cluster entitled Remembering the Holocaust, also sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University 2005 2007. Many of its members, graduate students, faculty, and administrative staff generously volunteered their scholarly expertise and organizational talents to make this conference a rich and rigorous exchange of ideas. A heartfelt thanks to Bowling Green State Universitys Department German, Russian & East Asian Languages, to the Department of History, and to the Office of Sponsored Programs and Research for financial contributions that have made the publication of this volume possible. We would like to acknowledge the many reviewers for their thoughtful and cogent comments in the vetting and editing process: Bill Albertini, Bowling Green State University Susan Anderson, University of Oregon Douglas Forsyth, Bowling Green State University Margy Gerber, Bowling Green State University Beatrice Guenther, Bowling Green State University Geoffrey Howes, Bowling Green State University Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth University Edgar Landgraf, Bowling Green State University Nancy Michael, Bemidji State University

viii

Acknowledgments

Manfred Mittermeyer, Universitt Salzburg Mary Natvig, Bowling Green State University Mark Polelle, University of Findlay Nikhil Sathe, Ohio University Marilyn Schrude, Bowling Green State University Annelies Schulte Nordholt, Universiteit Leiden John Sebestyen, Trinity Christian College Joanna Stimmel, Middlebury College Jennifer Taylor, College of William and Mary Larry Wilcox, University of Toledo Our translator in a pinch, Vincent Kling, of La Salle University. Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to Carol Koulikourdi of Cambridge Scholars Press for guiding us through the publication process, and to Mary Fahnestock-Thomas for her careful editing and formatting of this volume. Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio

Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts Introduction Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle
In her lyrical and groundbreaking film essay Die papierene Brcke (The Paper Bridge 1987), Jewish Austrian filmmaker and essayist Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952) tries to answer the question: Wer sind wir, Kinder der zweiten Generation? Was macht uns aus? (Who are we, children of the second generation? What characterizes us?).1 These questions about identity and its articulations, we discover in her film and writing, are directly related to transgenerational or mediated trauma of the Holocaust. In the postwar Austrian context, children of Holocaust survivors, like Beckermann, had to contend with a particular set of problems that led to their sense of living in limbo, in a no-mans-land, invisible (Beckermann 1989, 117). Nationally sanctioned amnesia regarding Austrian culpability in the persecution and destruction of fellow Jewish compatriots during the Anschluss period contributed significantly to this sense of alienation and deterritorialization. Moreover, Jews who emigrated or returned to Austria after 1945 did so only with the intention of eventually emigrating to Israel or North America. Furthermore, the acute trauma often kept Holocaust survivors from speaking about their experiences of the Holocaust, and this silence was often especially disconcerting for their children. Thus, given this complex politics of memory and the tension between past trauma and its transgenerational mediation, the construction of identity has remained a central preoccupation not only in Beckermanns films and writing, but for artists of the second generation in Austria and beyond. In The Paper Bridge Beckermann sets out toward Czernowitz (Cernauti), in the former Bukovina, her fathers birthplace, to mend the fragile
1

Here and throughout this book, all translations are by the respective authors unless stated otherwise.

Introduction

or destroyed bridges between past and present Jewish life across the chasm of the Holocaust, and to seek out pictures and locations corresponding to the stories about her forebears. Beckermann articulates absence and loss incurred by the Nazis deadly discrimination most poignantly with her questions in the film: Gibt es Bilder zu den Geschichten, mit denen ich aufgewachsen bin? (Are there pictures that correspond to the stories with which I was raised?); Wie kann man in der Kindheit der Eltern ankommen? (How can one gain access to the childhood of ones parents?). Ultimately she recognizes that she can only approach but never fully reach those sites, i.e., the locations of the stories of her Jewish heritage. She realizes, too, that the (pre-Holocaust) childhood of ones parents is physically inaccessible. Je nher, desto unerreichbarer (The closer one gets, the less attainable it becomes), she concludes in her voiceover in the film. Clearly, the passage of time has compounded, in a sense, Nazi attempts to erase Jewish experience. Beckermanns film essays from the 1980s through 2006, then, represent what one might call trajectories of her memory work, her struggle to bridge the temporal distance and counter the Jewish suffering and loss by engaging historical sources as well as familial stories, and pairing both with intense reflection and imagination. Beckermanns lifelong project thus reflects a creative intersection of history and art and illustrates the on-going challenge of finding appropriate forms for expressing absencedestruction, loss, and invisibilityas well as presence (see Works Cited for further references). This was the point of departure for our project as well. The crisis of knowledge that is the legacy of the Holocaust and the ever-incomplete process of making sense of this deadly discrimination and its effects on the following generations are the focus of this volume. As trauma specialists Dori Laub and Nanette C. Auerhahn conclude, too, in their extensive research on trauma and memory, It is the nature of trauma to elude our knowledge, because of both defense and deficit (Laub and Auerhahn 1993, 288). Moreover, as those who experienced the Holocaust firsthand become fewer and fewer, we turn our attention to how the next generations meet their postmemorial obligation of co-witnessing (Hirsch and Kacandes 2004, 18), defining, and representing the Holocaust for themselves and for generations to come. In March 2006 we invited scholars across academic disciplines history, literature, theater studies, visual arts, political science, philosophy, psychology, and sociologyto Bowling Green State University to explore the continued effects of the Holocaust on the present, on the ways in which the presentsixty years after the end of World War IIattempts to understand, (re-)define and represent received history or a vicarious

Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust

xi

past (Young 2000) and the implications of this memory work on the construction of personal and national identities. For, as Andreas Huyssen so directly states, the Holocaust has become a cipher for the twentieth century as a whole and for the failure of the project of enlightenment; it is also a powerful prism through which we may look at other instances of genocide (Huyssen 2003, 13). Moreover, since the discursive reign of the Shoah in our collective imagination is as apparent as ever and recurrent metaphorical use of the Holocaust threatens to erase it, it is the task of each generation to reflect on the ways in which we make sense of it and represent it for future generations (Lentin 2004, 14). A number of excellent studies of the Holocaust and its representation have appeared in the last decade (Hirsch and Kacandes 2004; Hoffman 2004; McGlothlin 2006; Vice 2003; Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall 2003; Fuchs, Cosgrove and Grote 2006). The particular contribution of this volume to the evolving Holocaust discourse lies in its attempt to juxtapose accounts of personal traumatic memory and collective memory, historical and artistic representations of the Holocaust, and German, Austrian, Israeli, and American perspectives. Thus, in addition to their attempt to provide an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the contributions as a whole reflect on the particularities of generationally inflected Holocaust writing and representation.2 All contributors to this volume are particularly cognizant of the fact that sixty years after the end of World War II, this past is inherited not experienced, i.e., a shadow, even the uncanny in Eva Hoffmans words (66), yet that there is no closure no Final Solution to the question of representation with regard to the Holocaust (Lentin 2004, 19). Furthermore, as Vivian Patraka notes in her study of Holocaust theater, representations of the Holocaust are a mark of goneness, and representing it is a process, an ongoing struggle, an ongoing performance (Patraka 1999, 4) in which we have a moral and pedagogical obligation to engage. We chose the word trajectories for our conference and volume title because memories (and their representations in the arts and in the social sciences) are not linear but multidimensional, fluid, even palimpsested, and often with no discernable destination. Personal and collective memories in particular meander, sometimes converging or antithetical, even displaced or forgotten. As Kerwin Lee Klein reminds us in his cogent study On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse, memory is also a social phenomenon that is located in rules, laws, standardized proce2

At our conference in March 2006, Irene Kacandes proposed this term as an alternative to second- or even third-generation Holocaust literature.

xii

Introduction

dures, and records books, holidays, statues, souvenirs Memory is not a property of individual minds, but a diverse and shifting collection of material artifacts and social practices (Klein 2000, 130). It is our intention in this volume to examine and compare the most current trends in the discourse of memory in Holocaust studies as articulated in the two disciplines of history and literary studies. This interdisciplinary collection of articles on the Holocaust begins, appropriately enough, with an interview with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, two of the keynote speakers at the conference, conducted by Julia Baker during the symposium. Both Hirsch, a scholar of literary and cultural studies, and Spitzer, a historian, reflect on the intersection of disciplines and on locating their subjective voices and personal/familial memories within their professional academic research. Their latest joint project on the Holocaust, a co-authored book forthcoming under the title Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of a City in Jewish Memory and Postmemory, investigates points of memory as Hirsch and Spitzer frame their approach to archival photographs, evidence that is paradoxically both concrete and ambiguous, and a resource for objective and emotional truths of the past (2006a; see also 2006b). Beyond emphasizing the interconnectedness of personal and professional biographies, the link between the embodied being and his or her presence in scholarship, they pose crucial questions regarding the impact and purpose of Holocaust memory work with regard to atrocities in todays world. Finally, they continue their own discussions of how to read photographs in both historical and literary contexts, an enterprise in memory studies that brings together private and public spheres, presences and absences, always also stretching the historical imagination. The first section of the volume, Trajectories of Memory in History, presents new research by historians on the intersection between memory and history, two terms that, although often used synonymously in historical writing, represented antitheses until some two decades ago, when they began to be yoked together in a supplemental relationship (Klein 2000, 128). Historians base their craft on many different components, and perhaps one of the most compelling yet elusive of these continues to be memory. Personal memories, contained in diaries or memoirs, in trial testimonies, in newspaper interviewsall of these move us and help us to understand the reality of a time we did not experience directly for ourselves. Yet we also know that many memories, as social practices, are silenced, while still others are never recorded and are almost entirely lost to us.

Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust

xiii

Representations of the Holocaust in History

In her essay, Between the Known and the Could be Known: The Case of the Escape from Auschwitz, Ruth Linn addresses the efforts of two men, Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler, who managed to escape from the concentration camp together in April 1944 and sought to inform the world about what was taking place there. Together they wrote a thirty-page report describing the gassings, the executions, and the starvation of inmates at Auschwitz and submitted their findings to Jewish leaders still alive in Slovakia, who then assured the two men that the report would be disseminated to the rest of the world. The Vrba-Wetzler Report was the first document about Auschwitz to reach the free world and to be accepted as credible. What became of the Vrba-Wetzler report and why do so few people know of its existence? And, more importantly, why dont many people know that two Jewish men did the unthinkableescaped from Auschwitz successfully? Linn has examined the fate of the story of Vrba and Wetzler among the Israeli public and in Hebrew school textbooks. She asks, Why was such an unprecedented heroic act in Jewish history absent from the narrative of the Israeli collective Holocaust memory? Furthermore, after Linn met with Vrba and interviewed him, she wondered why his memoir was not available in Hebrew and what the possible agenda was behind this silence. Her work reveals that the story of Vrba and Wetzlers escape and their subsequent efforts to inform and warn Jews conflicted with a hegemonic Holocaust narrative of Jews who disbelieved the information, even when it was given to them, and thus went like sheep to the slaughter. In the essay Child Survivors at Kibbutz HaEmekThe Recorded Tale Unremembered, Micha Balf reconstructs the process of forgetting a memory. Beginning in the mid-1940s child survivors of the Holocaust were arriving at Kibbutz HaEmek, most of them orphans. The kibbutz community welcomed these children and, in the course of their schooling, encouraged each child to record her or his memories, which were then published in pamphlet form and distributed throughout the kibbutz. Yet in the year 2000 not one person on the kibbutz remembered any of these pamphlets. All of those interviewed insisted that survivors never spoke about their experiences. Silence was etched into their collective memory. Balf asks, How was this possible? The community leaders of the kibbutz had been very well-informed regarding the destructive process in Europe and had held numerous commemorative events in 1943, 1944, 1945, and 1946. This commemorative process was crowned by the installation of the first memorial site on a kibbutz and in Israel overall: the Gola Corner,

xiv

Introduction

which was dedicated to the deceased children lost during the Holocaust. It represented a site of bereavement and mourning, and that is how the welldocumented memories of surviving children were lost. In the kibbutzs communal narrative only the dead were honored; living children and their stories of survival did not fit into this commemorative act. Balf traces a process of collective amnesia in which individual stories are forever lost in a collective narrative that seems to have no place for them. Joachim Neander discusses two legends, namely that the bodies of Jews were turned into soap on an industrial scale in Nazi Germany and that the skin of the victims of the Holocaust was transformed into lampshades. He shows how these stories first appeared as rumors and that, despite having long since been refuted by serious scholars, the idea of soap and lampshades made out of victims of the Holocaust has taken on a life of its own, almost as an urban legend, consistently reappearing. These accepted truths have appeared in political speeches, in artworks, in general histories, in popular culture, and even in displays in museums dedicated to the Holocaust. The underlying danger, as Neander points out, is that once such legends have been proven as false, Holocaust deniers and revisionists seek to use that information to question the veracity of genocide in general. In The Use of Nazi Symbols in Israel, Dirk Michel shows how Holocaust memory and the Israeli discourse of nation-building began as a sort of founding mythology of the Israeli state, and how over time the political use of both Holocaust discourse and Holocaust memory has been employed for political ends by the Israeli government and by their opponents. Beginning with the founding legends of the Israeli state, Michel argues that the events chosen to be included in the collective memory have been designed to refute the image of the weak Jew, and that likewise the institutionalization of memory, such as at Yad Vashem, have demonstrated again the connection between the Holocaust, the new state of Israel, and fighting against the idea of Jewish weakness. Finally, Michel tracks the rise of Holocaust discourse in Israeli political life, from David Ben-Gurion likening Arabs to Nazis, to settlers in Gaza resisting evacuation by the Israeli army and comparing themselves to deportees of the Warsaw Ghetto and the military to the Gestapo. Through numerous examples such as these, Michel seeks to encourage self-reflection in the political arena of Israeli politics. How do survivors relate their memories? What do they choose to preserve in writing and what is revealed in oral interviews? The essays by Mark Mengerink and Jamie Wraight explore the various ways in which Holocaust survivors remember certain elements of their experiences.

Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust

xv

Given Western civilizations Judeo-Christian heritage, which holds that all life is holy and that taking ones own life is a deadly sin, it is not surprising that for many survivors, the topic of suicide is taboo. Nevertheless, Mengerink breaks this taboo and analyzes Holocaust survivor attitudes toward the act of suicide, revealing a broad spectrum of responsesfrom condemnation of such cowardice, to admiration of such resistance, to ambivalence depending on the intent and/or the after-effects of the suicide. In most of the cases examined by Mengerink, practicing what Lawrence Langer terms deep memory has been avoided, in some cases to the point where the person who committed suicide has no name. It also becomes clear that an investigator might learn quite different things from reading a memoir and from sitting down to discuss the topic of suicide in an oral history interview. In many cases, Mengerink has found that even when interviewees bring up the topic of suicide, their responses are limited or unfocused. Jamie Wraights essay confirms that the results of a written narrative and an oral history interview can be very different and considers the influence of geographical place in eliciting memory, because so many survivors narratives build their story around a specific landscape. His findings suggest that in written memoirs or in diaries the description of the concentrationary universe is presented as a neat and tidy landscape, filled with barracks, guard towers, barbed wire fences, and sometimes the crematoria and gas chambers. Its social landscape is peopled with guards, Kapos, prisoners, and even civilian workers. The reader is struck by the sense of a place of order and detachment. Oral history, on the other hand, is able to capture the chaos, the uncertainty, and the absolute terror of the experience, and the listener often receives a deeper, more visceral experience of the concentration camp universe. In Wraights opinion, the oral history interview provides its audience with images, rather than concepts as presented in written accounts. Sidney Bolkosky urges all researchers to pay careful attention to what survivors are trying to express in oral history narratives. Both the speaker and the listener immediately experience the poverty of language to express the memory, and the narrative may not flow in a straight line, may seem disorderly, as the interviewee considers How can I tell you about this? Bolkosky urges listeners to observe the silences and acknowledge the flood of memories as the survivor struggles to find adequate expression for his/her experience. He suggests that perhaps, because of the inability of language to capture the enormity of the actual experiences of Holocaust survivors, our comprehension, at best, must rely on fragments of their memories and deep, eloquent silence.

xvi

Introduction

Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Fiction and Theater

In their important interdisciplinary collection of articles Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004), Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes emphasize that access to the Holocaust for the generations born after 1945 is not only multiply mediated. In their words, the Holocaust can provide some of the most sophisticated interrogations of representability, of the limits of art, of speech in the face of unspeakability, and of the intersection of ethics and aesthetics (7). By retrieving and reflecting on gaps, even lapses and incongruence between personal and collective memory and forgotten testimonial documents in the first section of this volume, historians point to the constructed and socially structured characteristic of not only collective historical narratives but also personal memories, and explore the different ideological trajectories of Holocaust discourse in Israel, Central Europe, and North America. In the second section of this volume, scholars in literary, cultural, and theater studies again examine the way in which Holocaust discourse has continued to develop in various cultural and national contexts and across generations at the turn of the twenty-first century. The contributions address the following questions: How do artists, scholars, and teachers negotiate the language of the Holocaust as survivors die, leaving future generations to respond to the dictum: Never again? How do children and grandchildren of survivors, perpetrators, even bystanders transmit the difficult legacy of the Holocaust in the German and Austrian context while navigating feelings of transgenerational guilt or victimhood? How can we do justice to survivor testimony when the survivors can no longer speak directly or mediate the testimony to us? How does transferred and multiply mediated knowledge translate into meaningful artifacts for the next generations, so that they might have a significant impact on national and even global understanding of genocide? To what extent can members of the generations without lived experience of the Holocaust represent it adequately and responsibly? In the first article, on reappropriations of the Golem legend in the last decade, Elizabeth Baer explores Jewish fiction and its narrative particularities in the decades after the Holocaust, calling into question Adornos injunction that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Taking the lead from literary critics Geoffrey Hartman and Sue Vice, Baer explores how intertextuality as a postmodern device and concept calls into question how stories or texts reflect reality and creates a tentative continuity across the divide caused by atrocities. In her words, intertextuality as a concept can be

Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust

xvii

said to instantiate the disruption, induced by the Holocaust, of our notions of human nature, evil, and history-as-progress, of meaning itself. In investigating reanimations of the Golem story as a paradoxical symbol of Jewish imaginative creation, Baer sets out to demonstrate how American writers such as Cynthia Ozick, Pete Hamill, Daniel Handler, and Michael Chabon and Thane Rosenbaum affirm a text-centered, moral Jewish tradition in the post-Holocaust era.3 Hans Kellner extends this discussion of the covenant of contemporary Jewish literature by posing the question of authorial ethics with regard to Holocaust representation. In other words, he explores recent artistic Holocaust representations in terms of their historicity, subject to the changes in passions of historical interest. Kellner identifies an artistic device he calls emigrant narratives prevalent in second- and third-generation art that captures the tension between lived trauma, which while authentic is becoming regretfully inaccessible as the survivor generation passes, and the possibility of new modes of Holocaust representations that might fill the void and redefine the relation between past and present. Kellner understands these emigrant narratives as nomadic devices that reflect a drifting of discourse through time, spreading the origin farther and farther afield, even as that origin is released and progressively clouded. He provides various examples of nomadic devices, ways in which successive generations negotiate meaning and represent the Holocaust. Kellner finds that Art Spiegelman uses (oedipal) masking in his double-volumed comic strip Maus, Jonathan Safran Foer adopts thesaural doubling in his 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, Sebald semantic drift in Austerlitz (2001), and all thereby dramatize the witnessing of the witness without arriving at a clear-cut conclusion. In the next two articles, both Markus Zisselsberger and Silke Horstkotte provide close and rich readings of W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz in juxtaposition to a second German-speaking author. In his reading of Sebalds novel, Zisselsberger emphasizes the interconnectedness of the ethics and aesthetics of testimony on the part of the postmemorial subject. He explores the question of how Sebald attempts in his literary scholarship and
3

Interestingly, Cathy S. Gelbin concludes about the literary Golem trope in German and Austrian Jewish writing of the 1990s that although [a] figure of destruction and messianic rebirth, the Golem now embodies the resistance, continuity, and revival of Jewish culture in Europe after the genocide and Cold War ideological divides (Fuchs, Cosgrove, and Grote 2006).

xviii

Introduction

fiction to allow witnesses of the Holocaust, specifically Austrian-born writer and Holocaust survivor Jean Amry, to speak. How do we, belonging to the generations who did not witness the Holocaust, arrive at an ethical mode of reading in which we do not simply appropriate experiences that we did not live, in order to extend memory into the present? Zisselsberger identifies the trope of travel coupled with narration as dialogic exchange as Sebalds mode to access Amrys traumatic and incommunicable memories and experiences in Austerlitz. In Zisselsbergers words, what Sebald passes on to the reader in Austerlitz through its dislocations and intertextual detours [that] gather the remnants of the past and search the traces of traumatic life-histories [is] the ethical and imaginative investment that Amry and, more particularly, his texts demanded from the reader (14). By way of this intertextual extension the reader is called upon to confront the incommunicability of trauma. By contrasting Sebalds Austerlitz with Stephan Wackwitzs 2003 Ein unsichtbares Land. Ein Familienroman (An Invisible Country 2006), Horstkotte, by contrast, explores yet another dimension. The central question of her article revolves around locating Auschwitz in these two postmemorial texts, post-Wall novels written as the New Berlin Republic is negotiating a renewed national identity grounded in a responsible official memorial culture. Horstkotte, like Zisselsberger, highlights the significance of the trope of travel and its relationship to both time and space/location in Austerlitz and An Invisible Country. Indeed, in her readings of the novels, Horstkotte excavates the ways and processes by which memory [and forgetting are] mapped onto the topography of post-war Europe in both. She also reflects on the varied uses of photography and its attendant association with the spectral, haunted past and the uncanny in each text. In both novels she recognizes that Auschwitz, while representing an enigmatic, difficult-to-pinpoint cipher whose meaning must continue to be investigated, remains at the center of not only German but European (socio-political) topography. In her article on another contemporary East/West German author, Monika Maron, Caroline Schaumann considers the integration of family photography in autobiographical fiction about the Holocaust in the New Berlin Republic. For Schaumann, Marons Pavels Briefe (1999; Pavels Letters 2002) is particularly central to a discussion about traumatic memory and transgenerational suffering and guilt, because it deals with the complex legacy of perpetratorship, bystanders, and victimhood within one familys trajectory of memories. For Schaumann, Maron engages in the extension of postmemory in reflecting on a bi-generational voice and imagination. The narrator must navigate her own, her mothers (postwar

Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust

xix

GDR communist) and her grandfathers (Jewish communist) perspectives. Having never met the grandfather who was killed by the Nazis, the narrator can only access his life through the memory and memorylessness of her mother and through documents and photographs bequeathed to her by her dead grandfather. Again, location and travel are significant in the excavation and representation of Jewish devastation and absence. And despite documents and family photographs, authentic memories, the narrator realizes, are impossible to access. What can be remembered entails the engaged imagination in the present of each generation to come, as demonstrated by Marons narrator in Pavels Letters. Julia Bakers contribution to representations of the Holocaust in the arts problematizes the notion of authenticity in relation to traumatic experience and autobiographical writing as she turns to two texts about childhood trauma, one fictional and the other defictionalized. She juxtaposes Bruno Grosjean/Dssekkers, a.k.a. Binjamin Wilkomirskis, controversial and fictional account of a childhood Holocaust survivor, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1996; published in 1995 in German under the title Bruchstcke. Aus einer Kindheit 19391948), and French author and child Holocaust survivor Georges-Arthur Goldschmidts recent autobiography ber die Flsse (Across the Rivers; French 1999, German translation 2001). Baker explores the production of life-writing in each. Grosjean/Dssekker resorted to fictionalizing his trauma into a convincing Holocaust memoir. Baker observes that Goldschmidt, by contrast, transformed his traumatic memories into a series of fictionalized texts only to succeed, finally, in arriving at what Baker terms a defictionalized life story with his most recent work. Situating her discussion of these two texts in psychological and sociological discussions of childhood trauma and text production, she concludes that the initial success of Fragments as a Holocaust memoir has to do with its convincing adherence to an established form of Holocaust testimony, a seemingly authentic therapeutic practice of making sense of traumatic memory. Baker shows how working through trauma is, however, a much more complex matter. Goldschmidt was engaged in a thirty-year process of fictional memory writing, a process by which he ultimately only slowly reenactedthus interpretedhis own traumatic life story, his mode of working through the atrocity. Both Christine Kiebuzinska and Maria-Regina Kecht provide engaging discussions of the way in which two of the most significant Austrian writers critique Austrian postwar cultural politics, with its collective amnesia regarding its involvement in the atrocities committed against Jewish compatriots during the Third Reich. Kiebuzinska demonstrates how Thomas Bernhards Heldenplatz, written during the commemorative year 1988,

xx

Introduction

fifty years after the Anschluss, and Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelineks 1991 Totenauberg represent postmodern enactments of postmemory. Kiebuzinska illuminates Bernhards and Jelineks dramatic strategies of critique. Bernhard, for Kiebuzinska, highlights ahistorical stasis and the pervasive contemporary fascist discourse in Austrian politics and media through his use of narrative circularity and the repetition of historic tropes, while Jelinek cleverly utilizes a palimpsest of landscapes (Alpine to Auschwitz), with its disconcerting associations with Austrian nationalist identity discourses. In her reading of Elfriede Jelineks very dense and complex 1995 novel Die Kinder der Toten (Children of the Dead), Maria-Regina Kecht also recognizes Jelineks narrative strategy of deconstructing the relationship between landscape and Austrian understanding of Heimat (homeland) and identity. For Kecht, Jelinek creates her most sophisticated critique of the dominant historical/mental space, a collective Geschichtsraum founded on the legacy of multi-ethnic Habsburg and, despite the various commemorative ceremonies in 1988, denies or distorts the historical reality of anti-Semitism and the persecution and murder of Austrian Jewish compatriots in the late 1930s and 1940s. Kecht explores how Jelinek counters official Austrian collective memory(lessness) in her postmodern novel by solidly anchor[ing] intertextual play in extratextual historical events, an aesthetic strategy on the level of lexic, discourse, story, and history that never allows for closure. Kecht identifies Jelineks project of continually deconstructing and reframing Austrians historical consciousness, the ideological nature of landscapes, so central to the notion of national identity in Austria, as moral commitment to justice and tolerance. The final contribution to this volume merges theory and practice most directly in Holocaust memory work while also successfully blending the disciplines of history and theater studies. Charlene Gould and Jeffrey Myers reflect on their collaborative work in the recent stagings of two Holocaust dramas, Diane Samuels Kindertransport (1995) and Tim Blake Nelsons The Grey Zone (1998) at Avila University in Missouri, as a means of re-presenting traumatic memory of the Holocaust at a time when the survivors are no longer accessible. Their pedagogy of Holocaust memory engaged students in serious study of historical documents coupled with creative imaginings, active involvement in constructing collective and individual memories of trauma, and a commitment to secondary witnessing through a dialogic performance where the community of spectators is encouraged to participate in the performative experience of trauma through talk-back sessions.

Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust

xxi

Bearing in mind the cross-cultural and transnational interest in this type of study and the importance of language in the construction of ideas, we have chosen to include quotations in the original language with the English translation in the body of the articles unless otherwise indicated. This collection in no way represents a completed process of memory work in Holocaust studies. The transcultural, transgenerational, and interdisciplinary perspectives only highlight the need for a continued engagement with the study of the Holocaust and its impact on the way in which we perceive our communities and the responsibilities we have toward future generations.

Works Cited
Beckermann, R. 1987. Die papierene Brcke (The Paper Bridge). 16 mm; 91 min. Austria: Aichholzer Film. . 1989. Unzugehrig: Juden und sterreicher nach 1945. Vienna: Lcker Verlag. Fuchs, M., M. Cosgrove, and G. Grote, eds. 2006. German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990. Rochester: Camden House. Gelbin, C. S. 2006. Of Stories and Histories: Golem Figures in Post-1989 German and Austrian Culture. In Fuchs, Cosgrove, and Grote 2006, 193207. Hirsch, M., and I. Kacandes, eds. 2004. Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust. New York: MLA. Hirsch, M., and L. Spitzer. 2006a. Strolling the Herrengasse: Street Photographs in Archival and Personal Memory. Paper presented at the conference Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, Bowling Green State University, March 2006. . 2006b. Whats Wrong with This Picture?: Archival Narratives in Contemporary Narratives. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5.2: 22952. Hoffman, E. 2004. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs. Huyssen, A. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

xxii

Introduction

Klein, K. L. 2000. On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse. Representations: Special Issue on Grounds for Remembering 69 (Winter): 12750. Laub, D., and N. C. Auerhahn. 1993. Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 74: 287302. Lentin, R., ed. 2004. Re-Presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century. New York: Berghahn Books. McGlothlin, E. 2006. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Patraka, V. M. 1999. Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vice, S., ed. 2003. Representing the Holocaust. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Welzer, H., S. Moller, and K. Tschuggnall. 2003. Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedchtnis. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag. Young, J. 2000. At Memorys Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Part I: Acknowledging Personal Presence in the Embodied Nature of Scholarship

A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer Julia Baker

This interview was conducted at the conference Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, held at Bowling Green, Ohio, United States, 2326 March 2006. JULIA K. BAKER: I am always surprised at how much both of you share about your personal lives in your academic work. I have never come across anybody else who reveals so many personal details, photographs, letters, and memories in their writing. From my point of view as a reader, this is one of the many aspects that make your work so approachable and attractive. Have you always written like that, or how did this writing develop? Do you sometimes regret your strong presence in your texts? LEO SPITZER: I have not always written like that. I am a historian and, generally speaking, academic historians tend to avoid the personal voice. In orthodox academic historical practice, the historian is not supposed to be evident in the text. Such historical work is characterized by a seamless narrative and impersonal, omniscient, historical voiceby the avoidance of the historians personal voice, and a masking of the constructed nature of historical inquiry and writing. What happened was that I began to resist these conventionsthese presentations of an omniscient, objective, historical voice devoid of personality and subjectivity. I wanted to show how the historian is invested in the construction of a historical accounthow he or she shapes and constructs it as an embodied being, with a subjectivity and personal history that need to be taken into account. So I therefore began to introduce my personal voice into my historical writing. In the first book I wrote, The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Reactions to Colonialism [1974], my personal voice is actually not very evident in the narrative text. But when I started working on my second book, Lives in Between [1990], I became very interested in comparing Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and exclusion with that of Africans and Afro-Brazilians over the course of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. My idea was to carry out that analysis through comparative family history. And in the early stages of my research an incredible thing happened. Searching for materials on Jewish families on whom I might focus, I went

A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York to see what, in their rich archival holdings, they might have on the family of Stefan Zweig, who had been one of my parents favorite authors. When I examined their catalogue, I found that, among other holdings, they owned a Zweig family genealogy. But the catalogue reference I had found read: for Zweig, see Spitzer. This was so weird. The explanation for this of course was that in the eighteenth century, Zweigs and Spitzers had intermarried in the Habsburg realmand, indeed, when I then began to unravel the genealogy of that family and to expand on it, I realized that I was researching not only the story of the family of Stefan Zweig, but also that of a branch of my own family. And I became so personally invested and involved in that story that I felt that my personal voice needed to be apparent in the book I was writing. And after completing that book I decided that my voice should certainly be visible in my subsequent work, Hotel Bolivia [1999], which is a book about Jewish emigration to Latin America in the era of World War IIa story in which I was both a personal participant and of which I became a historian. And in the aftermath of that bookat this pointI can no longer conceive of writing history without acknowledging my personal presence. So there you go, a very long answer to a short question. MARIANNE HIRSCH: I probably have a long answer for you, too. No, I did not always write that way, because that is not how we were taught to write at all. When I was first in college and graduate school, we did not even use I in our papers, and in fact I grew up with New Criticism and structuralism, so even the authors of the literary works we were writing about remained almost anonymous. We were interested in the text, which was not even historically contextualized. The authors biography was not important, and then, in structuralism, there was the death of the author in favor of the text. Its really been a long route from then to where I am now. On the other hand, I would say that almost everything I have written and published has been personal. My dissertation was about exile and emigration, about how different worlds interact with one another in the space of narrative. As an immigrant myself, I closely identified with Henry Jamess, Michel Butors, and Uwe Johnsons characters and with the narrative choices the authors made. Later, when I became involved in feminist work, I wrote about mothers and daughters, and that also was very personal. Mostly the personal part was in the introduction and preface; the rest was a theoretical and literary discussion of mothers and daughters.

Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust

It was when I started working on family photography that I found that you could not analyze that genre without actually looking at your own photographs. To account for the power of these objects, of why a small square of paper is invested with so much affect, we really have to look at our own family images and think about them closely. And that is where the self-revelation and the more autobiographical writing came in for me, and became important not only to do, but also to interrogate. But of course none of this is separate from what was happening in the world of scholarship at large: I think there has to be a permission to do that kind of work. When we first started to do that, we were actually fellows at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and we were involved in a seminar on personal criticism and personal scholarship. We read a lot of examples and talked about them. It was a moment: Alice Kaplan had published French Lessons, for example, and Nancy K. Miller Getting Personal. There were some who were very skeptical; they thought this kind of writing to be too narcissistic, too exhibitionist. By reading examples, you could tell that often there is a very fine line of saying too much or too little. And, as you said, using personal material to make a larger theoretical point, or just telling the story for its own sakein which case it is something elseis not an easy thing to do. But people were really beginning to do that in the 90s; and there was also the question: who had the permission to do that? Do you have to have tenure, for example? For me it comes out of feminist theory and understanding that the personal is the political and the personal is the scholarly. I believe in the embodied nature of scholarship. So I am a great advocate of it, but I dont think that the autobiographical element is essential. You know, I was the editor of PMLA for the last three years, and I am reading a lot of scholarly work, and mostly it is not at all autobiographical. I always look for the story of a mind working through a problem even if I dont know the personal story of that person. You really want to feel that scholarly work is grounded in some way in the world. That is what I would advocate. And I dont think that I will always write like that, but I will always write about things that I care deeply about, and in that sense I will be in them. JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH): In your article Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile [1996] you wrote about your efforts to organize a trip for yourself and your parents back to Czernowitz, how you kept checking back with them, and how you finally found out that they really did not want to go. During your keynote address on Thursday [Strolling the Herrengasse: Street Photographs in Archival and Personal Memory,

A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

held on 23 March], it was nice to learn that your parents apparently did eventually go back with you. I thought it was also interesting to see the photo you took of your parents in the Herrengasse. How does this photo (in which they are standing) compare to those that show them strolling the Herrengasse as a young couple? And a more general question to both of you: How does your current book project fit into this idea of a return? MARIANNE HIRSCH: Thats interesting. When we took the photo of them in 1998, I dont think we were consciously thinking of all those other street photos particularly. But somehow, through some lucky stroke, we took it around the same spot that they were taken by street photographers in the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s. The Herrengasse was a Begriffof course we went right there and they told us about it; it was an obvious place to take a photo of my parents. Perhaps we were thinking of that little picture of them in the same spot in 1942, during the worst time of persecution, subliminally, because that picture was in the album, but we had not really investigated it or thought about it. Our link to it, in 1998, was just a subliminal pull. LEO SPITZER: That photo, actually, was taken with a video camera. So we do have them walking on the Herrengasse as well. We can animate the photo. JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH): What do you think of your parents in the photo from 1998? MARIANNE HIRSCH: Well, it is a completely different moment in their lives. Not only have they changed, but the place has changed as well. You can see it even in the photohow quiet it is, how little street activity there is. It was much more lively in the 30s; there were more stores, more people, more activity, and in 1998 it was a very quiet place. Then when we went back in 2000, it was more lively again. But yes, we went on that trip; it was probably related to my parents reading the article you mentioned and they said, I guess you really want to go. And we also found out through other people that the trip was not as complicated as we had thought. It was a great trip; they loved it. We actually wrote an article about the trip; it is called We would not have gone without you. JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH, then to LEO SPITZER): You turned over the old photo of your parents to find the year in which it was taken. This process of turning the photo over to find something so interesting and to make it the basis for a scholarly investigation is something I found Prof. Spitzer also did in The Album and the Crossing [1999]. Didnt you also turn a photo over and find something new and interesting?

Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust

Have you come to turn all old photos over to look at their backsides? Could you reflect on that process? Do you think of yourself as a detective? LEO SPITZER: Yes, thats right, I first wrote about turning photos in a piece that subsequently became part of a chapter in Hotel Bolivia. There I had been puzzled by a series of photos in an album that my parents had put together of their shipboard crossing from Europe to South America in 1939photos, in effect, of their forced emigration from Nazi Austria to Bolivia. There was a tremendous incongruity in those photos between what they appeared to depicta relatively pleasant voyage aboard the Italian Lines SS Virgilio, and the reality that they were in fact refugees who not only had just escaped the horrors of post-Anschluss Austria, but who were also in mourning for my grandfather Leopold, who had died aboard the very ship on which they were traveling. It was only when I accidentally turned the photos over, after trying to remount and fix them more securely in the old album, that I found my fathers handwritten comments that totally contradicted the pleasant images the photos seemed to reflect. This clearly demonstrated what seems like an obvious point, but one very often missed: that when we read photos for the historical evidence they might provide, we need to read them not just for their indexicalityfor their connection to something that stood before the camera lens in the pastbut also for what they dont show, or mask, or hide. In a sense, I guess, when we remain aware of that and try to read images beyond their frame and beyond the apparent, we are doing a form of detective work. JULIA K. BAKER: You are working on a book together. Are you going to do that again? Do you work well together? LEO SPITZER: A book project is a big undertaking, and I hope that we are reaching the conclusion of this project by the end of this year. It has been a rich and fascinating experience for me because Marianne and I have very different working styles. And in order to work together, we had to adjust our practices. I tend to be a slow writer. It has always been difficult for me to go on to a next sentence before I feel that the previous sentence is rightwell written and reflective of my intent. When I complete a piece, I dont like to revise very much; I revise and revise again while I am in the process of creation. Marianne works much faster, completes more than I do in a session, and revises in subsequent drafts. I think that in the course of our collaboration, however, we have influenced each other, and we have managed to work out a writing practice that seems to work well and that leaves both of us satisfied.

A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

I feel very fortunate to be married to a partner with whom I enjoy collaborating intellectually, and to be immersed with her creatively in a project in which we share similar backgrounds and to which we bring different disciplinary training. I am of course not from Czernowitz, the place we are writing about, nor is my family. Her family is from there. But I do have an Austrian-Habsburg background (Czernowitz was the capital of the Habsburg province of the Bukowina), and the experience of Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and emigration that is so central to the story of Czernowitz Jews is extremely familiar to me from both my work on Viennese Jews and from my own family history. In my work on Czernowitz that historical and familial background has been incredibly influential. And for me personally it has been a tremendous advantage to benefit from Mariannes literary imagination and theoretical sophisticationto look at things in a different way, and to learn how to read documents and visual materials in a manner that is different from the way a historian might approach them. Collaboration has been a great and rich learning experience for me. When we finish this project, I look forward to working together again, perhaps not on such a large project, but on many more smaller ones. MARIANNE HIRSCH: Yes, our work came together in our previous two books. I was working on family photography and Leo was working on Hotel Bolivia. And I am not sure whether he would have done so much with the photos if I had not looked at photos all the time. And my own work, until very recently, has not been particularly historically inflected. I just did not really know how to do that kind of research and how to write historical narratives; as I told you, I was not really trained that way. I have learned to pay much more attention, and to learn. When we first started doing this, we were worried because we do have such different writing styles, but the adjustment has been great. It has been really exciting. I am not sure whether we will do another book together, but I am sure there will be articles and smaller pieces. And now we get invitations and we drag each other along and say, do this with me. Somehow it feels more reassuring and it is a lot more fun. So we do these presentations together. One of the biggest challenges in the book is the voice. As a genre, this book is a second-generation memoir. But the voice in a memoir cannot be we, so we had to solve that problem. We did it by writing different chapters in different first-person voicesperhaps a bit of a challenge for the reader, but most of the time it is really clear who is speaking.